Around February 23, 1854

In this day and age, newspapers rarely print fiction. Of course, there is the occasional magical story written by a third grade class that appears every once a week in the Arts and Entertainment section of the paper, but for the most part, fictional stories of real substance are not published in newspapers anymore. This was not the case in the 1800's. Appearing in The Valley Star each week was...

Susan Sillers Darden, a white woman living in the Mississippi Delta region during the mid-nineteenth century, left behind a lengthy diary that covers many of the day-to-day occurrences and various happenings of her neighborhood. In an 1854 entry, Darden recounted a particularly unusual event: the exhumation of two corpses. Darden wrote that the remains of Rodney King and Mrs. Ogle were unearthed...

Governor Andrew Johnson's recommendation of a tax to support the creation of public schools in Tennessee was made law. The governor was a strong believer in mass education and forced his unenthusiastic legislature to pass the law. For the first time in its history, Tennessee had fully-operating public schools.<br />In Johnson's first message to the Assembly on December 19, 1853,...

On Capitol Hill, Sen. Houston spoke in opposition to the passage of the Nebraska Bill on the grounds of violation of Indian treaties. The National Intelligencer wrote that he reminded his fellow senators that the good faith of this Government was pledged on more than one occasion to the Indian tribes that the lands included in the contemplated Territories should be perpetually reserved for their...

One criterion for personal enlightenment in Charleston during the 1850s was the acquisition of a personal library. Such a library could be large-Charlestonians Thomas Smyth and William Gilmore Simms owned 20,000 and 12,000 volumes, respectively, in the 1850s-or much smaller. Regardless, it was important to have the newest book on your shelf, a collection of the classics, or at least a few books...

Nearly every summer, as the heat rose in New Orleans, so did the death toll. Most of the people who expired were victims of the same mysterious affliction: high fever, muscle aches, vomiting and an eventual yellowish tint to the skin that preceded death. Baffled physicians prescribed everything from doses of quinine to sponge-baths to calomel, with no telling what the results would be from patient...

On March 13, 1854 the Charleston Daily Courier ran a series of correspondences from Havana which reported on the escalating Black Warrior affair. These correspondences explain that on February 28 the ship Black Warrior stopped in Havana on its way from Mobile to New York as it had done numerous times in the past and upon arriving delivered its manifest to customs as was required. The captain listed...

1853 marked the peak of the yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans. In that year alone, 7,790 people perished. Yellow fever was so feared that it was often called the American Plague.' In 1853 relatively little was known about the transmission cycle of the disease or how it was spread. Physicians did not know if it was infectious, yet instead of quarantining the afflicted (the best thing...

There were always fears of slave rebellions. In a letter dated October 13th, 1849, from E.W. Cooper, Thomas Cassels Law learned of a Negro insurrection in his home district of Darlington, South Carolina. Cooper served on an investigating committee to respond to the matter. Although they could not gather sufficient evidence to have the four leading insurrectionists hanged, they were lodged in jail...

In 1846, Edmond Kelley was 29 years old, married to fellow slave, Paralee, and had four children. When Edmond's owner, Nancy White, was forced to free a slave, she chose Edmond, who was also licensed to preach gospel. After she procured the necessary paperwork, namely "a pass to go any and every where to preach", Edmond headed to the northern states where he could work, leaving his home...